In many industries, personnel are responsible for producing identifiers, such as labels or tags, for use in association with products, components of products, cabling, network hardware, packaging, organization, etc. The labeling requirements for each product, for example, may be defined by one or more of a myriad of sources, ranging in form from undocumented industry usage, to proprietary specifications, to national and/or international standards. The specific labeling requirements vary depending, among other things, upon the market segment, the application and the job size. Educating personnel to be familiar with the specific labeling requirements of even one particular application may be a daunting and never-ending task, particularly in an area where the labeling requirements are regulated by continually evolving standards, such as the labeling of network hardware.
Labeling systems have been developed to assist users in creating labels. Known labeling systems, however, suffer from being either (i) so generalized that the user is required to have significant specialized knowledge about the particular application, which adds time, increases the potential for errors in label generation, and limits the user's ability to become proficient with a variety of labeling applications, or (ii) so specific that the user cannot utilize the labeling system outside of the narrow application for which it was developed. Thus, improved labeling systems and methods are needed.